How the Moroccan became the main immigrant workforce in Spain (and how it compares with the arrival of other countries)

Spain has passed in just three decades of being a place that many started to find better job opportunities to become an important destination for international migratory flows.

Far are “the emigrant”, the couplet of the Songer Juanito Valderrama, or the adventures of José Sacristán and Alfredo Landa in the movie “Vente to Germany, Pepe”. Spain is every time a more diverse country, with the opportunities and challenges it entails.

The Spanish economy is expanding, it shows the growth of its gross domestic product (GDP), which has become the envy of its European neighbors, and immigration figures, which has tripled in the last 20 years.

Today, one in five people living in Spain has been born out of the country.

“The progress and good economic situation of Spain owes much to the contribution of migration that has come to develop in Spain its life project,” said the president of the Government, Pedro Sánchez.

Almost 9.5 million residents in Spain were born away from their borders. More and more come from Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador or other Latin American countries, which represent 47% of the total.

But if it is broken down by nationality, the Moroccans, with 1,092,892, are the most numerous, and have unbalance in the number of social security affiliations to the Romanians, which for decades was the group with the highest number of foreign registered registered.

Moroccans work disproportionately in agriculture, construction and hospitality. Some have been recently arrived.

A second generation now faces the challenge of those born between two cultures. And the collective has become an objective of the xenophobic discourse of ultra -right groups, which associate immigration with crime, despite the fact that the data denies it.

The events of Torre Pacheco, where on the weekend organized groups of ultra -right organized “cuces” – as they themselves defined – of North African migrants and faced groups of Moroccan young people, has put the entire community on alert.

As of June 2025 there were 363,337 Moroccans quoting social security, followed by the Romanians (344,905), Colombians (243,863), Italians (212.416) and Venezuelans (196,361).

Foreigners already suppose in Spain 14.1% of the total contributions, according to social security figures.

How is it possible that, if almost half of all residents in Spain born abroad are Latin American, these countries are behind Morocco in the affiliation list?

The explanation is due, in part, to the Spanish naturalization system, which privileges Latin Americans.

It is not only that most do not need a visa, but that at two years of regular residence they can access naturalization.

For others, including Moroccans, this period is much more extensive, and they are asked to take 10 years of residence in Spain in order to initiate the naturalization procedures, which are also long.

“It is an abysmal difference and a very large privilege, which makes it very tempting,” says researcher Sebastian Rinken, of the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC).

Many of those Latin American immigrants manage to become Spanish in just two years, so they no longer appear in statistics as foreign workers.

Spain has had two great immigration peaks in its recent history.

The first began at the end of the 90s to 2008, when the global financial crisis ended the real estate bubble in the country that had been a great magnet of foreign employment.

In that decade, the immigrant population went from 1.2 million to about 6 million.

From the pandemic and, especially, in the last three years, in which more than two million people have arrived, the immigration flows to Spain have accelerated again, largely through the asylum channel, whereby many Venezuelans have arrived, for example, many Venezuelans.

And, despite extremist speeches, those immigrants come to work.

Of the 5.2 million people who joined the Spanish labor market between 2002 and 2024, 75% had double or foreign nationality, as reflected in the study “Spanish immigration reality and its management: facts and perceptions” of the Foundation of Applied Economics Studies (Fedea), of which Rinken is one of the authors.

Moroccans, like the rest of the Maghreb – argles, Tunisian, Mauritans and Libyans, the inhabitants of that historical region of Northwest Africa – have been nevertheless, economic migrants; They arrive in Spain looking for job opportunities and a better future.

The macroeconomic figures explain why: in 2024, the GDP of Morocco was US $ 154,451 million, while that of Spain of US $ 1,722,746, more than 11 times higher.

“It is an economic emigration in the case of newcomers, but there is also family regrouping, since when they have been in Spain for a while they can bring their families,” explains to BBC Mundo Ahmed Khalifa, president of the Moroccan association for the integration of immigrants, which is based in Malaga.

These family networks have been consolidated in recent years, thanks to the fact that the latest reforms of the Foreigner Law – the most recent entered into force in May 2025 – have made the requirements more flexible to access family regrouping.

As the Immigration expert Sebastina Rinken explains, “the Moroccans initially had difficulty accessing the Spanish national, but that has already changed.”

“For a few years now, the proportion of naturalized Moroccan origin has increased. And a Spanish logically has more facilities to attract his family.”

The sectors in which they work depend on the autonomous community in which they reside, but are mainly agriculture – the great entrance door to many Moroccans -, hospitality and construction.

While in the 90s and the first years of this century the vast majority of Moroccans who arrived in Spain were men, there are more and more women.

His number is already approaching that of his male congeners, says Kalifa, who explains that most of them are used in the domestic service.

It is fundamentally unqualified sectors, which are worse paid.

The Moroccan collective “does not stand out for specially high educational levels” compared to other nationalities, “although it is often surprising how many immigrants have a better education than their work situation would suspect,” says Rinken.

Overementation, recalls, not only affects immigrants. Spain is the country in Europe where there are more workers with a much greater training than they need for the work they perform.

The Foreigner Law itself, Khalifa adds, promotes this, “because it offers immigrants difficult to cover. The works that Spaniards do not want, the toughest, because there are immigrants.”

But there is another reason that explains that Moroccans have more difficulties to be used in other sectors: the so -called glass ceiling, the metaphor that describes the invisible barriers that prevent minorities from developing and reaching leadership positions.

“That glass roof exists and we see it exaggerated every day,” ahmed khalifa acknowledges.

According to this degree from the University of Malaga, it is something that they suffer from even from the Association.

“Although we have excellent results” regarding the support and advice offered “they tell us that we are an association of immigrants and there we have to stay,” he explains, which does not allow them to evolve towards something greater.

It is something that is seen “in companies, on access to resources and unfortunately it is based many times on skin color or name,” Khalifa denounces.

But the problem of ethnic segmentation of the labor market does not concern Moroccans only, but is more general, Rinken adds.

“I fear that it is part of what Spanish society could perceive as a deal. On the one hand it was very open to migration because it understood that it contributes to grow, to be a richer, more prosperous country, but all this in exchange for performing the work they did not want,” says the CSIC politicalologist.

Although this is not something that Spain has invented and exists in many other societies, “says the researcher,” many have been left with the idea that each one has their place in the opportunities structure. “

And that of immigrants, especially Moroccans, is in the hardest and less desirable works of the labor market.

“Who is working in summer now in the field? The absolute majority are immigrants. Who worked in the field in the pandemic? Only immigrants. Who is in construction? Most are immigrants. All the hardest works. That is why migrants are also related to these jobs,” says Ahmed Khalifa.

Sebastian Rinken believes that with Moroccans this idea also has historical reasons.

“Spain and Morocco are the uncomfortable neighbors. Each country usually has a neighboring country in which, for historical reasons, its close enemy finds. Enmities that can be overcome at the institutional level, but perhaps not so much emotionally and culturally among populations,” says the migration researcher.

Spain and Morocco have a long shared history, not always easy.

In it, medieval history is mixed, with the Berbres and Arab invasions of the Iberian Peninsula of the VIII to the 15th centuries; Colonial history (Spain exercised a protectorate about the north of what is now Morocco between 1912 and 1956), in addition to territorial disputes (periodically groups in Morocco arise that claim the sovereignty of the Spanish cities of Ceuta and Melilla, which are located in North Africa).

To this is added the conflict of the Western Sahara – the territory that Spain colonized until 1975 and Morocco annexed, despite the fact that the UN had promised a referendum of self -determination – that has traditionally been subject to political tensions.

Irregular immigration is another reason for disputes, with the extended impression in Spain that Morocco opens the borders when it seeks to press its European neighbor for some reason.

Although relations between Spain and Morocco are complex, they are also narrow, with broad commercial cooperation and political ups and downs.

Whether because of that historical weight or for other reasons, “Moroccans are the worst collective valued by the Spaniards” when surveys on perceptions about immigration, says Rinken.

This is noticeable, for example, when trying to rent a home.

The association that chairs Ahmed Khalifa was able to verify it empirically. A study carried out by researchers from the Association, which at the moment there are only preliminary results, saw how the response to those who sought to rent a home was very different if the interested party was Spanish or Moroccan.

The Moroccan was not only with many more negative, “but the treatment was very different, it is very, very alarming,” says Khalifa.

This is hard for a group that exceeds one million people, “but they are aware that they have all ballots to become an atoning goat,” says the researcher.

This is what happened in Torre Pacheco, or what happened in the Almeria municipality of El Ejido 25 years ago, the worst xenophobic disturbances of the last decades.

The brutal aggression to a neighbor of Torre Pacheco whose main suspect, already detained, is a young Moroccan – while two others recorded it on the mobile to upload it to social networks – it served as a trigger for ultra -right groups to call to punish the entire collective.

The image of the man after the beating generated great shock.

The alleged aggressors would not even be from Torre Pacheco, where a third of the inhabitants are Maghreb, mostly Moroccans, and where many have been living in absolute cordiality for decades.

But this coexistence, denouncing the interviewees, are being altered by the “xenophobic and nativist speech that certain groups and parties are trying to normalize in Spain”.

“That speech is getting a lot, and it is seen in the street, in the comments of social networks, it is lived, it shows. Unfortunately, the ultra -right has gained ground to coexistence and there is a lot of suffering on the part of immigrants,” ahmed Khalifa acknowledges.

And this discourse also suffers from the second generations, the children of those Moroccan immigrants who were born in Spain and, despite having opportunities other than those of their parents, often run into the same glass roof.

When they are small, they feel it, they feel the same as others, says the president of the Moroccan association. “But when they reach a certain age they see how they are called or treated differently, and there the problems begin. But the problem is not in children, but how society treats it,” Khalifa defends.

They barely have referents in positions of responsibility or leadership, in politics or in the media.

For Nabil Moreno, the president of the Muslim community in Torre Pacheco, in an interview with BBC Mundo also pointed to that second generation, of which some members would have become “conflictive.”

Many are “Ninis”, a word that in Spain is used to designate young people who neither work nor study.

“They are 24 hours on the street, so, they are normally looking for conflicts. They feel racism, they are told to go to their country but when they go on vacation to Morocco they treat them as immigrants and many do not speak Arabic. They are young people who are very angry, they are very rebellious, it is very difficult to calm them, because the hatred they have inside is not now, it comes from many years,” said Moreno.

One of the few has been the footballer Lamine Yamal, a young star of the Spanish football team and FC Barcelona.

On any walk through the squares of many towns and cities of Spain you could see children – Spanish and immigrants – playing football with their shirt.

But with this example it is also seen, according to Ahmed Khalifa, the double standards of society: “When you put goals is Spanish and when the fault is the Moor, this is something that is exaggerated in the football fields, and this is what happens to young immigrants in general.”

The first generation of Moroccans has it generally more difficult for the language and because it has to make its way. Their children born or raised in Spain should be able to make their way.

“That is why the second generations are the cotton test,” adds Sebastian Rinken. “And it is still about to see how this party evolves.”

Chart by Caroline Souza, BBC Mundo visual journalism

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